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Berman: Curt Gowdy State Park is a mountain biking mecca that lives up to its reputation

By Joshua Bernan, OutWest Columnist

Posted:
07/30/2013 12:01:00 AM MDT

The International Mountain Bicycling Association has designated the trails at Curt Gowdy State Park as Epic, their designation for the best in a region. (Doug Brown, The Denver Post)

Dirt slides and scrapes beneath my tires as my bike careens around a banked turn, down and up a whoop-dee-doo, between a pair of cracked granite boulders, and then I blast into an open meadow under an enormous gray-white sky.

The wind is cool at 7,000 feet, and the view of rolling landscape and rock is endless. The trail beneath my wheel rises again, then flies out from under me, twisting like a brown ribbon up and over the next rise.

This must be what Zach Martin, the guy at Rock On Wheels bike shop in Cheyenne, Wyo., was talking about when he said I'd find some nice "rolling, flowy singletrack" on the Stone Temple Circuit, a 3.75-mile loop trail that begins and ends at the Aspen Grove trailhead (just inside the north entrance to Curt Gowdy State Park, wyoparks.state.wy.us /Site/SiteInfo.aspx?siteID=4).

"It's got everything Curt Gowdy has to offer," Martin said of the trail while adjusting my shocks in the shop. "It'll be a good warm-up loop for you, then you can hit it again and take the Pinball trail to a secret waterfall."

What he didn't know was that it had been years since I'd ridden serious singletrack, and I'd never even tried a full-suspension bike before. In the shop, I tried to hide my newbie status by pointing knowingly and nodding wisely as he showed me the trail on a map.

The ability to try more than one trail at Curt Gowdy is an intentional feature of the 32-mile stacked-loop trail system, first conceived in 2003 and constructed in 2006. Todd Thibodeau, a Wyoming State Parks official who has served as project manager on the Curt Gowdy trail system since its inception, explained the concept to me over the phone.

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"It's built on the ski-area model," Thibodeau said, adding that it's essentially meant to allow people to choose different rides of varying lengths and difficulty.

But halfway around the Stone Temple Circuit, I'm getting all the excitement and difficulty I need. The uphills are just forgiving enough, the granite technical areas just short enough, and the downhills — Martin was right — just flowy enough for a novice like me.

Yet Curt Gowdy also attracts experienced riders, garnering an official Epic designation from the International Mountain Bicycling Association — a distinction the organization awards to the best riding in a region.

On Wednesday, a hundred or so world-class racers will compete on the very course I just rode (of course, they'll be speeding through it 10 times faster).

The success of the project in Curt Gowdy State Park is undeniable: The park had 51,000 visitors in 2005, said Thibodeau, before the new trails were built, and 130,000 last year. Martin confirms that the construction of the trails in nearby Curt Gowdy has helped create an entirely new mountain biker community in and around Cheyenne.

They'll soon have more trails to choose from. Thibodeau reports Wyoming State Parks is using the same model to construct similar trail systems in Glendo, Keyhole and Guernsey State Parks, as well.

For now, this one is enough for me. Or is it? Finally, the last gravity-fueled descent sends me soaring into the trailhead parking lot — sooner than I'd expected. I guess time flies when you are riding an epic mountain biking trail in Wyoming.

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